cushla.'

'Who from?' repeated she, growing more uneasy.

'Auch! woman, are you going to take it in, or no?'

'Come in the morning, my good man,' said she, 'for sorrow a foot you'll
put inside the house to-night.'

'An' that's what I'm to tell them that sent me.'

'Neither more nor less,' replied she.

And so she heard a heavy foot clank along the pavement, and she tried to
catch a glimpse of the returning figure, but she could not, though she
laid her cheek against the window-pane. However, she heard him whistling
as he went, which gave her a better opinion of him, and she thought she
heard the road gate shut after him.

So feeling relieved, and with a great sigh, she counted her money over;
and answering Betty's shrill summons to the study, as the woman was in
haste, with a 'Coming, coming this minute,' she replaced her treasure,
and got swiftly into poor Charles Nutter's little chamber. There was his
pipe over the chimney, and his green, and gold-laced Sunday waistcoat
folded on the little walnut table by the fire, and his small folio,
'Maison Rustique, the Country Farme,' with his old green worsted purse
set for a marker in it where he had left off reading the night before
all their troubles began; and his silk dressing-gown was hanging by the
window-frame, and his velvet morning-cap on the same peg--the dust had
settled on them now. And after her fright in the kitchen, all these
mementoes smote her with a grim sort of reproach and menace, and she
wished the window barred, and the door of the ominous little chamber
locked for the night.

''Tis growing late,' said the dealer from without, 'and I daren't be on
the road after dark. Gi' me my money, good girl; and here, take your
stay-hook.'

And so saying, she looked a little puzzled up and down, as not well
knowing how they were to make their exchange.

'Here,' says Moggy, 'give it in here.' And removing the fastening, she
shoved the window up a little bit. 'Hould it, Betty; hould it up,' said
she. And in came the woman's hard, brown hand, palm open, for her money,
and the other containing the jewel, after which the vain soul of Moggy
lusted.

'That'll do,' said she; and crying shrilly, 'Give us a lift,
sweetheart,' in a twinkling she shoved the window up, at the same time
kneeling, with a spring, upon the sill, and getting her long leg into
the room, with her shoulder under the window-sash, her foot firmly
planted on the floor, and her face and head in